12 Font Model and Cross-Platform Deployment

Modern business needs warrant a seamless integration and interaction across any platform and infrastructure. Oracle Reports enables businesses to develop and deploy information to all levels within and outside of the organization. However, since any enterprise reporting tool is bound to use some platform-specific functionality like the system fonts or printer fonts, there exists a possibility that the look-and-feel of the report changes when the report is ported from one platform to another; for example, from the development platform (commonly Windows) to the deployment platform (commonly a UNIX-based platform).

If the new font model is not used, the user needs to manually configure the font settings as present in pre-11g and apply a few fixes manually when deploying your reports on UNIX platforms.

This chapter also covers those scenarios where the choice of platform may affect the look-and-feel of the report output. Each report output format (for example, PDF, HTMLCSS, and RTF) that is open to cross-platform issues is covered in a separate section. These sections provide step-by-step instructions that will ensure that your report output looks the same on all platforms. These guidelines are followed by troubleshooting information and FAQs. Since multibyte and Unicode reports involve some additional steps, separate sections are devoted to those topics. This chapter is applicable to Oracle9i Reports, Oracle Reports 10g Release 1 (9.0.4), 10g Release 2 (10.1.2), and 11g Release 1 (11.1.1), except as specifically noted.

Before you proceed, it is strongly recommended that you are familiar with the concepts and terminology outlined in the following chapters: